GAINSBOROUGH RUNNER-UP
RUNNER-UP GAINSBOROUGH PRIZE
‘WHO RUNS THE WORLD? – DISCUSSION OF ENGINEERED CORPORATE EQUALITY’ By Jessica Richens
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ack in 2011 Beyoncé answered this question simply: “girls”, in her song ‘Run the World’. Yet in 2011 only 12.5% of FTSE100 companies board seats were occupied by women (Griffiths 2018). Granted this is probably not the type of female empowerment Beyoncé was referencing, but the lack of women in positions of power in our corporate world in 2011 would contradict her answer.
In 2018 this percentage had risen to 29%.
What has changed? In 2011, Lord Davies introduced a voluntary target-based system to improve the gender balance on company boards in the UK, this voluntary approach was intended to increase the number of women in leadership roles, and therefore move towards greater corporate equality. This system was implemented with the ambition to improve gender equality specifically across UK businesses, by moving more capable women into seats on corporate boards.
FIGURE 1: Source: Grant Thornton 2019
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